Evolutionary Arms Race in the News:
- Viruses in soil bacteria, known as Phages, are quickly evolving to more affectively infect their bacterial hosts.
- This shows that evolution happens, even on such a small scale.
- The Phages are able to infect the soil samples around them better than soil samples from just a few centimeters away.
- Phages could not infect other soil samples as well as they could infect their own.
- This is known as ‘local adaptation’, the Phages evolved in order to infect their soil but were not as easily able to infect other soil.
Reflection:
I chose this article because the title involved the words ‘evolutionary arms race’. An evolutionary arms race is when two organisms are constantly (over several generations) evolving so that they can out do the other with means to survival. The bacteria and their viruses were in an evolutionary arms race because the virus would evolve to infect the bacteria, and then the bacteria would evolve to resist the viruses. This article was interesting because it had to do exactly with what we were learning in class. It helped to explain the concept by giving a valid example in a way I could understand.
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